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32. One Year Later
Clwyd, Cormorant, Pyt, and Wilfred spend a year and a day in the Fifth Hell. ** Wilfred learns Abyssal, Celestial, and Infernal. He also learns to sail on the lakes of the estate, but through the constant torment of Volrath, the bone devil captain of the ship, and his hellish crew, combined with the ever-present threat of the Styx and its stupefying effects should he ever fall in, Wilfred develops some anxiety towards large bodies of water. ** Pyt learns Celestial, struggles with Abyssal and Infernal, gets a sweet enchantment put on his viol, and watches the cambion child that Lilova births age rapidly, such that it appears to be a fully grown adult by the end of the year. Lilova and the other succubi don't let the bard get close to the child at any time, saying he has no claim to the cambion. He also developed a real taste for watching the regular maze hunts, which were used to exercise the household's hell hounds and howlers, as well as torture the same few mortals who were damned to run it, die, and respawn in the lakes to have to run it again next time. ** Clwyd learns Abyssal and Infernal, and hits the books hard to absorb as much information about fiends and the lower planes as she can. When she isn't studying, she's practicing and experimenting with her hellfire magic. By the end of the year, she no longer makes any use of her artificery, and instead has learned to control her Pact Magic extensively. ** Cormorant swaps his armour, gets a sweet enchantment put on his sabre, and begins recording some of his life so it isn't just oral history subject to his bad memory. This new interest in storytelling leads him to share with the others his Tales from the Wetwar. ** Also, feeling the absence of Clark and Malak, Cormorant decides to undergo instruction in field surgery. The household provides him with a teacher - a unique-looking dwarf named Vigri who is one of the mortals being tortured by the estate usually, but has a reprieve as he teaches Cormorant. They operate on the people who run the mazes, and watch the same people die at their table many times over the year. Vigri is not keen to talk on what landed him in the Hells, but after months of stoic instruction, he eventually says to Cormorant that he hopes the man will one day do good in the world with the surgery Vigri has taught him, and in doing so perhaps he will be Vigri's salvation, making up for misdeeds once done. ** Cormorant buys Bracelets of Nondetection for himself and Pyt - the bard refused to buy one for himself, figuring any problems from not having one would sort themselves out. Clwyd buys one for herself. * Nix and Badger return after some months, revealing that it is now the late summer. ** Badger now sports Driscoll's magical rapier. ** By Cormorant's estimation, Badger looks a little conflicted on the night he returns to the estate. ** Badger doesn't talk to any of the party, though he does give them the matching sending stone to the one they carry, thus leaving them with a working pair. ** Nix has dinner with the group that evening and they ask him some questions about the state of the world: *** Badger and Nix killed Duster early on. *** Badger then waited until an opportune chance to kill Driscoll. *** This has left his little group in a very dire situation, and Nix believes they'll be forced to make a tough decision soon. He thinks they'll be choosing to die rather than running away. *** Wick has been missing for some time. *** Quinn and her ship have recently gone away on an errand. ** Cormorant asks Nix if none of this bothers him, as his nonplussed demeanour at the table seems to suggest. Nix replies that of course it doesn't, since Driscoll, his friends, and their cause were all insignificant in the grand scheme of things. ** Badger and Nix leave the Hells again the next day. Nix does not return until near the end of the year. Badger does not return at all. * Eventually the day arrives for the party to return to Terca Mahres. ** Nix has been at the estate's main palace since his arrival back in the Hells. ** When he eventually speaks to the party again, he informs them that there's been a slight change of plans. His mother wishes to speak with Clwyd, so the pair of them will be waiting in the palace for her call. After the conversation is done, Nix will bring Clwyd to meet the others on Tortuga. ** In the meantime, someone else would transport the other three back to Terca Mahres: Pyt's cambion offspring, now a leathery-winged man named Erebus. ** Erebus denied any connection of significance to Pyt when Cormorant asked about it, transported the trio in relative silence, and then took his leave once he'd plane shifted them to Tortuga's docks. ** The three of them relished being below a bright blue sky, breathing air without the scent of sulpher. Cormorant jumps in the ocean, and doesn't even mind all the poo floating in the waters surrounding Tortuga. ** They find Aerendyl waiting for them at the end of the docks. * The four of them go to the bathhouse in Riverside to relax. ** Wilfred doesn't get in the water. ** Aerendyl catches them up on the year that they've missed. ** When asked, the elf explains that, no, he hadn't hunted any vampires since he'd last seen them. However, he and his companions had gone after a draegloth, a monstrous fusion of elf and demon. ** He explains that Tortuga's Iron Quarter is still in lockdown following Nogg's visit five seasons ago and the assassination of the Saint of the Forge, the Shell Lord that ran the district. There's no proof that it was Nogg or Shandy, but most people believe that to be the case anyway. Tortuga's ironoar dwarves have been locked in a succession struggle ever since, and nobody except ironoars are allowed in or out of the district. ** He tells them that Kind has been out of the picture for a long time, and the Proprietor has a number of new frontmen running his operations around Tortuga. ** The Garden of Sand is being run by a human man named Rude, and it has a new headline show called the Chaos of Clay, with a prize that's now grown to 37,000 gold pieces for any team that can beat it. ** Cormorant asks on the off chance Aerendyl heard anything about Skyburn over the year. He's surprised to hear that the elf had purposely looked for information on her. He'd learned that when she was last on Tortuga, she'd had a fight with some of Shandy's forces and burned down their establishment, a pub in the Sinner Side called the Cat and Biscuit. After the fight, the iconography of a group called the Makers of Eden was found at the ruins of the pub. Aerendyl hadn't got around to looking into who they were. He did postulate that if Skyburn, a vampire, was fighting forces of Shandy, herself a higher vampire, then Skyburn might be involved with and doing the bidding of a group called the Court of Midnight, a collective of higher vampires in Faerie. That is, if this conflict was the result of a vampire feud. ** They decide that they should settle their affairs in Tortuga while they wait for Clwyd, and then head to Agnor for some information and answers. * They go to the Garden of Sand to watch the Chaos of Clay. ** They see some warm-up acts, and learn that Bigly survived Nogg's purges two winters back, since the troll competes in some of the opening fights. ** Then they watch six different sized teams try and destroy two clay golems, fighting in an arena filled with empty-looking pits than burn the competitors when they fall in, but only heal the golems when they do so. All the teams lose to the Chaos of Clay. ** Cormorant buys some drinks and asks around about details on the Tantrum Wars. He learns that the final battle of the eighteen years of fighting was fought in the past autumn, when the Matricide, the Indomitable, and the Wicked Sister met the combined might of Nogg the Dread Drake and Breakneck Zephyr in the waters between Driscoll and Shandy's territories. The Battle of Loudwater saw Nogg's fleet badly damaged, but ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, resulted in the destruction of those three remaining ships flying Driscoll's flag. The stretch of water has been dubbed Loudwater since. ** The group then sleep on the Drunken Dragon in Tortuga's docks, trying to start working towards attracting a klabauter, a sea spirit, to inhabit the ship. *** Wilfred had read up on the subject, and while the process of earning and/or attracting a sea spirit was unclear, it involved loving and respecting a ship, treating it as a home, and not damaging its sense of identity by frequently changing its name, its flag, etc. * The next day, the group try and finish all their business in Tortuga. ** Wilfred heads to Glittergold in the Small Quarter, going to the Smoothhands Tailors to get some new clothes made after spending a year in Hell in his old outfit. The clothes will be ready on the following day. ** Aerendyl buys a purple scarf while they're in the shop. Mauve is the in-colour that season in gnomish fashion, apparently. ** Next, Cormorant heads to the Pieces to check on his friends and make sure they survived Nogg's purges. *** He finds Cap playing dominoes as usual. They have a brief conversation and everything seems fine with the old man. *** He learns that Cricket is 'working' in the printing houses of Penny Town at the moment. Cormorant was content just to hear he was alive, though he was sceptical about the working part. *** Lastly, he went to HQ, the old breakfast bar he'd taken the party to, that his old friend Deena had run - Deena who was killed in Nogg's purges and later turned into a zombie. Deena who had been killed because of Cormorant and the party. He sees her little sister, Angie, working the counter now. They have a brief chat and Cormorant excuses himself after saying , 'I'm sorry about your sister.' ** On their way out the Pieces, Pyt asks one of the Crooked Warden's urchins about info on who from Driscoll's old crew survived. *** The kid runs off and returns saying, 'Warden wants to know who's asking.' *** Pyt lies, saying he's asking for Shandy. *** The kid runs off again, and then comes back: 'Warden still wants to know who's asking.' *** Pyt gives up, unkeen to draw too much attention to the group. *** The rest think he may have done enough to turn the Warden's eyes on them anyway. ** Cormorant sends a message to his old acquaintance, Greenbeard, after buying out the man's anonymity with the Warden for 300 gold (which Aerendyl paid). *** Cormorant's message: 'Been a while. Fancy a drink? -Cormorant' *** The reply: 'The Alchemist. -Senestrago' *** The group head to the pub in the Sinner Side and Cormorant finds his old enemy-turned-admiral-turned-acquaintance upstairs, deep in his cups, haggard, stinking, and more bitter than ever. The old water genasi has the group take a seat, his table filled with empty cups and spilled ale. *** The pair clash egos, swear at each other a lot, and share a drink. The others mostly just sit at the table and stay out the way. *** Greenbeard tells Cormorant that the last time he ran into Skyburn, she was asking him about his old ship, pissed him off with the topic, they started fighting, but she mostly just laughed and took her leave. *** He also says that he's interested in taking back what's his. His ship and his seat. The same fucker what took his ship has it now, and he'll need to empty a few of the other seats before he can claim his own again. Still, he's got some guys moving in the world that he's waiting on. 'Greenbeard's got a plan,' he says. They're not convinced. *** Wilfred floats the idea of a deal with Nix to Greenbeard, insulting the old man a little, but eventually resulting in him telling the gnome to make the introduction if he wants to, but he's not promising anything will come of it. *** Cormorant tells Greenbeard what has recently befallen the party: they might be a cult now, working for a powerful employer, and that they'd just spent a year in the Hells. He even floats the possibility of a team up with Senestrago, causing the genasi to take pause and ask what Cormorant's game is. *** In the end, no immediate alliance comes from the meeting, but Cormorant had gained some more info on his quarry. ** They buy two weeks worth of sailing rations for their trip, and pimp out the portable hole with a ladder (for easy access), storage shelves, a barrel full of ale (courtesy of Wilfred), and a block-and-tackle (because the gnome wizard is the strongest of the group. Seriously.) * The group then sleeps on the Drunken Dragon again, this time keeping watch in shifts. ** Their plan, once Clwyd is back and they can push off: *** Aerendyl uses some magic to get cats for them to sail with. *** They go and see Clay, and inquire about dragon skins, etc. *** They DON'T stop in Bisquay, since they left it with so many different factions and groups interested in hunting them. *** But they do go to Agnor. Category:Part Four